Donald Trump Wins the Presidency

Well, these are going to be interesting times. I hope that this country is prepared to bear the responsibility of what it did last night.Granted, it's not that I'm a big fan of Hillary, but let's look at some facts here:

1. Trump is a Republican president and will be pushing contractionary policy in a time where this country just started to get over a recession.

2. Do you like the ineffectiveness of trickle down economics? Because that's what we're going to get.3. The House and Senate are still Republican after last night, so at least for the next two years, Trump is going to be able to pass pretty much whatever he wants.

4. Healthcare is going to be completely gutted. I know ObamaCare sucks, but for now the futures of our health and our children's health is quite uncertain.

5. Last night we had a chance to finally be able to send our children to college without burdening them with massive debt. That just went out the window.

And the purest fact of them all is that the United States is supposed to be the greatest country on Earth - yet other countries have free healthcare, free education and do it all while not completely thrashing the environment.

Last night, neither choice was great, but I honestly don't think that this country thought this election out logically. I hope I'm wrong and Donald Trump turns out to be the greatest president of all time. Only time will tell.

It's interesting that you are most concerned about those things. In my mind, while bad, they are reversible (at reasonable cost/thrash) policies that will have limited damage if fixed in time. The risks I'm most concerned with are the less reversible ones:

* Not only are we going to ignore climate change for 4-8 years, we will do things that actively damage efforts to combat it. At a time when large parts of Antarctica are breaking off and potentially floating out into warmer waters, I'm very concerned that we aren't prepared for the worst.* Unstable foreign policy due to an unstable leader can trigger or destabilize many hotspots in the world, for instance North Korea.* Irreversible damage to norms of civil politics, as well as potential meddling by foreign adversaries (i.e. Russia) in our political process. Goodwill and peaceful political norms take forever to establish but take just a single tweet to unravel.